The Dead Hamlets: Book Two of the Book of Cross Read Free

where he came from.” I didn’t point out that whoever had killed the fey had probably done him a favour. There was no use in stating the obvious.
    Morgana smiled that wicked smile of hers at me. Those lips. . . .
    “We would not have invited you to this performance if it were only one dead fey,” she said. “But it is not only one dead fey.”
    She snapped her fingers and the house lights came up. Now I saw why the audience was so silent. They were all dead in their seats. Some had stab wounds like Polonius, others were charred corpses. A couple had split-open skulls and I could see inside their heads. They were mostly fey, but I saw the faerie Peaseblossom among their number. I remembered him pouring me one ale after another when I was a prisoner of Morgana’s in that pub in the Irish countryside, both of us laughing as I drank away the memories of the outside world. Now his skin was an odd colour that suggested poison, and the foam that surrounded his mouth backed it up. He wore a dress that would have looked Elizabethan if I hadn’t been around for the actual time period. It was stage garb. The other dead all wore similar outfits: period costume of the kind you see in plays but that never really existed in the actual time. They all stared sightlessly at the stage and continued to pay us no mind.
    I shook my head again. I had to stop going to the theatre. Nothing good ever came of it.
    “Something has been killing my subjects,” Morgana said. “Anytime we put on a production of
Hamlet
. Always a seeming accident.” She waved her hand to take in the audience. “But this is too great an accident, even for the faerie.”
    I considered the corpses, as I’ve done so many times before. They didn’t tell me anything. They usually don’t unless I raise them from the dead.
    “So your plays are haunted,” I said. “Or maybe you’ve got a demon problem. Or some other infestation. What does this have to do with me?”
    “We need an exorcism, of course,” Morgana said. “Or whatever it is that you mortal types do to rid yourselves of such problems. It’s not really the sort of thing with which we have experience. But now that you have become one of my loyal subjects. . .” She smiled that wicked smile of hers.
    Now it was my turn to smile.
    “I don’t think so,” I said, although it hurt like hell to say the words. The enchantment wanted me to do anything I could to help her.
    Morgana looked bemused, and Puck spat at me, although he grinned even wider. I half expected the dead to turn their heads to look at me, but they stayed dead. The dead are rather predictable that way. Most times.
    “You don’t think so?” Morgana asked, arching an eyebrow.
    “I have no interest in helping you,” I said. “Not while I’m under your spell, anyway. Lift it and maybe then we’ll talk.”
    Morgana chuckled, which I wasn’t expecting. It’s never a good sign when the faerie queen laughs at you. Or, I suppose, whenever any queen laughs at you for that matter.
    “I thought you might say that,” she said. “So I have prepared an incentive to move you to action.”
    As if on cue, a young woman walked out of the wings and onto the stage. She wore a white dress that looked as if it had been made from spider’s silk. She sang as she walked.
    “He is dead and gone, lady. He is dead and gone. At his head a grass-green turf. At his heels a stone.”
    I recognized the song. Also from
Hamlet
. The character was Ophelia. I recognized who was playing her as well. Amelia. My daughter. She was no longer a babe, like the first and last time I’d seen her. Now she was in her late teens. She had aged unnaturally fast in the court of the faerie queen, but I still recognized her. I saw the combination of features in her face. Mine and Penelope’s. Her dead mother’s. Just one in the list of so many people I hadn’t been able to save over the ages, but the one at the top of the list. Amelia’s skin bore the grey pallor of